Pal was a natural for the project. A Hungarian by birth, he was more than familiar with the middle-European world created in the Grimms' fantasies. Pal was the creative force behind a number of animated shorts as well as such epic effects films as The War of the Worlds (1953), The Time Machine (1960), and Atlantis, the Lost Continent (1961). Pal's script intercut the biography with six of the brothers' tales (shortened to three in the final version due to the excessive running time). Within their attempts to write the story of a local squire's family, the brothers also relate some of their best-loved fairy tales: "The Dancing Princess" (a king offers his daughter's hand to anyone who can solve the puzzle of why she wears out a pair of shoes every day); "The Cobbler and the Elves" (a down-and-out shoemaker is helped by the wooden elves he has carved for the children of the village); and "The Singing Bone" (a dragon-killing servant gets revenge on his evil master).
Pal realized the picture was too big to handle himself and hired Henry Levin to direct the biography sequences while Pal oversaw the fantasy segments. Levin was no stranger to this kind of project; he had directed the Jules Verne fantasy Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) and an Italian film, The Wonders of Aladdin (1961). Pal wanted to cast Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness as the brothers, but the studio opted for contract players Laurence Harvey and Karl Bohm, the German actor who had appeared in the British shocker Peeping Tom (1960) and later made several films with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Pal did get his way on one demand for authenticity, he insisted on shooting in the Grimms' homeland. But plans to shoot in Kassel, the village where they were born, were stymied when he discovered it had been bombed out in World War II and rebuilt as a modern city. So the production moved to two tiny Bavarian villages and the famous castles at Neuschwanstein and Weikersheim. Many locals were added to fill out the large cast of well-known performers, ranging from ingenue Yvette Mimieux to character actors Oscar Homolka and Walter Slezak to comedian Buddy Hackett.
Once location shooting was complete, however, there was still extensive work to be done in the studio stateside. Here Pal and his son David's specialty really shone in the painstaking process of creating the Puppetoon elves for the cobbler story and the dragon slain in "The Singing Bone."
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm premiered in the U.S. in August of 1962 and has the distinction of being the first dramatic story film shot and exhibited in the 3-camera Cinerama format. Several months later the epic all-star Western How the West Was Won (1962) opened to even better business in the Roadshow exhibitions that Cinerama theaters required. While these two films were successful box-office attractions (The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm did better in European markets, not surprisingly), the expense of production combined with the sale of Cinerama to Pacific Theatres ensured that these would be the last story films made in the format. Beginning with It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), story films exhibited in Cinerama theaters were shot single-camera, usually in 70mm Ultra Panavision.
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Color Cinematography, Best Color Art Direction, and Best Music Score Adaptation. It won the Oscar for Best Color Costume Design.
Producer: George Pal
Directors: George Pal, Henry Levin
Screenplay: Charles Beaumont, based on the stories of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm
Cinematography: Paul Vogel
Editing: Walter Thompson
Production Design: Edward Carfagno, George Davis, Henry Grace, Richard Pefferle
Special Effects: David Pal, Tim Barr, Wah Chang, Robert Hoag, Gene Warren
Original Music: Leigh Harline
Principal Cast: Laurence Harvey (Wilhelm Grimm/The Cobbler), Karl Bohm (Jacob Grimm), Claire Bloom (Dorothea Grimm), Barbara Eden (Greta Heinrich), Yvette Mimieux (The Princess), Jim Backus (The King), Russ Tamblyn (The Woodsman/Tom Thumb), Buddy Hackett (Hans), Terry-Thomas (Ludwig), Beulah Bondi (The Gypsy), Ian Wolfe (Gruber).
C-136m. Letterboxed. Closed captioning. Descriptive Video.
by Rob Nixon
